Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Aidan Hartley

Please take your holiday in Kenya this year

 Rift Valley Many of my British tribe fled Kenya around independence in 1963 because they believed there was no future. Gerald Hanley, an Irish novelist who knew the country, forecast ‘a huge slum on the edge of the West, Africans in torn trousers leaning against tin shacks, the whites of their eyes gone yellow, hands miserably in their pockets…’ For sure, poverty here is an awful, destabilising reality. But Kenya’s past 51 years is a story of hard work and enterprise in which there has been real social mobility and countless stories of rags to riches. In everything from finance to farming, Kenyans are Africa’s most successful capitalists. Still, for

Andrew Taylor

You know something’s up when MI6 moves its head office to Croydon

Alan Judd’s spy novels occupy a class of their own in the murky world of espionage fiction, partly because they blend two elements of the genre that are rarely seen together. First, they are grounded in a wholly plausible version of the intelligence community, where decisions evolve in Whitehall committee rooms and the wiles of politicians and bureaucrats are just as important as the machinations of moles. Secondly, their central characters often recall an older tradition of gentlemen patriots that goes back to John Buchan’s Richard Hannay. The combination shouldn’t work but in Judd’s novels it does. These elements meet in the character of Charles Thoroughgood, who has already appeared

Caroline Moorehead

The Spanish Civil War hotel that Capa, Hemingway and Gelhorn called home

In February 1924 the Hotel Florida, a ten- storey marble-clad building with 200 rooms, a glass-roofed atrium and red plush furnishings, went up on Madrid’s Gran Via. Along with the Ritz in Paris, certainly the most celebrated hotel in the literary world, the Florida became, during the two-year battle for the capital waged between Franco’s nationalists and the republican forces, the meeting place for an eccentric, glamorous and self-important assortment of war tourists, zealots, opportunists, romantics, dreamers, buccaneers and writers who had come to observe the fighting, file dispatches of variable truthfulness and proclaim loyalty to the republic. In its own way, the Florida has become as emblematic of the

James Mcnamara

The Australian literary icon who fooled her family

There aren’t many places you can get shouty about Proust without losing your job. The Lane Bookshop in Perth, Western Australia, is one of them. As an undergraduate, I’d pitch up there for work on Saturday mornings with as much song in the heart as a hangover allowed. Because for me the Lane wasn’t just a shop, it was a salon. The young staff, all writers, were encouraged (and fed, when cash was scarce) by the kind owners. Debates sparked between the shelves. And great Australian novelists came in to buy the books. The late Elizabeth Jolley was one of these. She must have been 80 when I last saw

Ted Hodgkinson

The man who loathed emoticons – especially :)) as it reminded him of his double chin

Paul O’Rourke, the narrator of Joshua Ferris’s third novel, is a dentist who spends his days staring into the murky recesses of his patients’ mouths. Despite encouraging them to floss, he is himself a man of curiously ingrained habits. Averse to the digital age and oddly superstitious, he stockpiles VHS recorders and watches the Boston Red Sox with a plate of bland chicken and rice, always careful to avert his eyes from the sixth innings. His small Park Avenue staff implore him to get with the times and develop a website for the practice; but Paul is a Luddite with no interest in kowtowing to a culture of smartphones and

Michael Bywater

Stephen King – return of the great storyteller

Stephen King’s latest novel, Mr Mercedes, is dedicated to James M. Cain and described as ‘a riveting suspense thriller’ — a phrase so closely approaching 100 per cent semantic redundancy (a non-riveting thriller? A thriller entirely free of suspense?) that it tells us precisely nothing. All it does is declare that the reader will keep turning the pages. Which we will. That’s what King makes us do. Except Mr Mercedes isn’t, on the surface, a thriller; and you can bet that the consensus will be that King is writing what will be called ‘off-piste’. It’s a slender book, by his standards — only 400 pages — you can get it

John McEwen

No special pleading needed for this disabled Dutch master

To discover an ‘unknown’ is the dream of anyone connected with the arts and in Johannes Thopas (c.1626-1688/95) we have just that. This book catalogues the exhibition now transfering from Aachen to the Rembrandt House Museum, Amsterdam (12 July–5 October). The curator is Rudi Ekkart, who discovered Thopas’s meticulous lead-pencil (plumbago) drawings on parchment as an art-history student in the early 1970s, when he had unlimited access to the University of Leiden’s famous drawing collection. After that he kept a record of everything to do with the artist, which now finds formal acknowledgment. Other recognised Dutch artists who were deaf and dumb have shown that a normal life could be

Matthew Walther

Hillary Clinton’s autobiography seems destined to join her husband’s – in a bin marked ‘Free’

Last year a Washington-based journalist called Mark Leibovich wrote This Town, a book whose thesis was, roughly, that Washington-based journalists are terrible people. Leibovich’s book exemplified a trend among self-described Beltway insiders who decry as venial and insipid the trivialities they spend their lives reporting. Sounds a bit precious, I know, not to mention suicidal. But it’s supposed to be waggish and endearing and ironical. The latest victim of this coprophagic tendency is Hard Choices, Hillary Clinton’s third book. Barely a week after its publication, with over a million copies in print, it has already been written off by the hacks who spent months doing potted F.R. Leavis numbers on

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Recipe for a modern baker: first, move to Hoxton

If I were the kind of person who invited people to come and have a bite to eat that very evening — and you’ve got to watch it in London, where people are inclined to draw themselves up to their full height, even by email, to ask what sort of sad case you think they are to imagine they’re free right now as opposed to in six weeks’ time — well, I’d reach for the Morito cookbook (Ebury, £26, Spectator Bookshop, £20). It is the book of the fashionable restaurant/café (and most cookbooks these days are) of that name, in London’s Exmouth Market, described by the authors, Sam and Sam

Ian Thomson

The punk who inspired a generation of British woman to pick up a guitar

Viv Albertine is deservedly famous as the guitarist of the tumultuous, all-female English punk band The Slits. Their debut album, Cut, released in 1979, combined jangly Captain Beefheart-style guitarwork with reggae rhythms and sardonic social commentary. Ariane ‘Ari Up’ Forster, the vocalist, added an element of wild-child abandon to Tessa Pollitt’s infectiously heavy bass lines. The album is a masterpiece. Albertine’s memoir takes its title from her mother’s routine complaint to her: ‘Clothes, clothes, clothes, music, music, music, boys, boys, boys — that’s all you ever think about!’ Albertine came to Britain from her native Australia in 1958, aged four. She lived in some poverty with her sister, French father

Connie Bensley

The breasts that launched Les Fleurs du Mal

This novel is based on the life of Charles Baudelaire and the relationship he enjoyed — or endured — with his Haiti-born mistress, his Black Venus, Jeanne Duval. We first see him in 1842, a young poet of 20, making his dandyish way through the slums of Paris to meet his friends at a cabaret theatre for an evening of wine and hashish. Here he will encounter for the first time his future muse. She is voluptuous, in a long red dress, singing risqué songs. In no time he is unlacing her boots and preparing to squander the legacy which he is shortly expecting. However, there are, as the author

Mark Mason

When Geoff Boycott was a DJ in a Sydney nightclub

Sport isn’t about putting a ball into a net or over a bar or into a hole. It’s about the people who are trying to do those things. Frank Keating, late of this and several other parishes and now just late, understood that truth, which is what made him such a great sports writer. Matthew Engel explains in the introduction to this anthology that his old colleague ‘liked sportsmen and made lasting friendships with them. This would be impossible nowadays.’ Most of the pieces report on those friendships rather than on matches: by portraying sportsmen as they were off the pitch Keating revealed what made them succeed on it. So

James Walton

Those weren’t the days

If you wanted a brief epigraph for Linda Grant’s recent fiction, then five words from Dorothy Parker might well do the trick: ‘Time doth flit/ Oh shit.’ Certainly, there aren’t many writers who seem so astonished, even affronted, by life’s tendency (admittedly a strange one) to pass by more quickly than you ever imagined. Her previous novel, We Had It So Good, followed a group of students from the Oxford of the late 1960s to the present day, where they were bewildered to find themselves in the unthinkable position of being quite old. Now her new one does the same with a group of students from the York of the

David Crane

An old soldier sees through the smoke of Waterloo

There is a very nice story of a dinner for Waterloo veterans at which Alexandre Dumas — ‘Dum-ass,’ as the Antarctic explorer Taff Evans would have him — was for some reason present. I can’t remember now the exact wording of the exchange between them, but Dumas had clearly spent so much of the evening sounding off about the battle as if he knew what he was talking about that a French general at the far end of the table could finally take no more. ‘But my dear Dumas,’ he protested, ‘it wasn’t at all like that! And remember, we were there!’ ‘Precisely, mon général,’ came back the reply. ‘You

Wednesday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Spectator Debate: Sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. Welcome to Generation Y’s world

The Spectator’s latest debate – Stop Whining Young People: You’ve Never Had It So Good – was most disgracefully skewed in favour of the proposition. Not only did the epically relaxed moderator Toby Young flagrantly and self-confessedly side with the proposers but so too did the event sponsor, Alan Warner of Duncan Lawrie private banking. Warner recalled, in his introductory speech, how very difficult it had been as a young man coming to terms with the fact that he would never be able to afford to live, like his parents’ generation, in Chelsea. Instead, he had to venture to the exotic reaches of the Angel, Islington and had to endure

Thursday

Charlotte Mitchell

A pork-pie and Capri-Sun fuelled hike around England’s moors

‘No, no’ I said, when The Spectator’s literary editor rang up, ‘I’m sure you must be able to find someone who really wants to read another postcolonial analysis of the figure of the North African in English literature.’ But the book turned out to be about the other kind of moor, so I said yes, though not without some anxiety that it might be like Eeyore’s Gloomy Place: Rather Boggy and Sad. Luckily, William Atkins’s book, though it acknowledges that moors can be bleak, isolated and unforgiving, especially for permanent residents and those scraping a living off the land, is on the whole quite cheerful. It is a series of

Richard Davenporthines

The opéra bouffe that was the Bretton Woods conference

There ought to be a comic opera about the Bretton Woods conference — Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face, about Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, with its mordant libretto by Philip Hensher, should be the model. Everything about the conference was overdone. It was held in 1944 in the gargantuan Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire, which provided a preposterous background of gimcrack luxury. The arrangements were as farcically managed as the Atlanta Olympics. The boy scouts who were dragooned in to help run the conference would make a wonderfully playful chorus in the Adès-Hensher opéra bouffe. There were 400 delegates from 77 countries — to say nothing of hundreds of slavering

James Mcconnachie

A Labour MP defends the Empire – and only quotes Lenin twice

In a grand history of the British empire — because that is what this book really is —  you might expect more hand-wringing from a historian and Labour MP who has previously written a life of Engels. But despite quoting Marx half a dozen times (and Lenin, twice!) there is something about the idea of empire that excites Tristram Hunt. And this is a book about ideas, for all that it is rich in architectural description, economic fact and colourful anecdote. It describes how — and indeed when and where — the imperial ideology shaped and reshaped itself. As such, it is a nuanced riposte to those historians of empire,

Matthew Dennison

Not quite romantic fiction, or literary fiction, or commercial fiction – but still quite good

Elements of Raffaella Barker’s new novel, her eighth for adults, suggest commercial fiction: a narrative that oscillates between the aftermath of the second world war and the present day, and two failsafe locations, Cornwall and the Norfolk coast. But From a Distance is not commercial fiction. Barker’s narrative is sparingly studded with quotations, but this is not literary fiction either. There is a strong love interest, which does not blossom into romantic fiction. Barker’s novel is a hybrid, enjoyable, ultimately heart-warming. It lacks the freshness and charm of the earlier Hens Dancing, but recalls some of its vividness and forensically detailed scrutiny of family life. In 1946, Michael, a demobilised

John Preston

The queen, the cardinal and the greatest con France ever saw

You usually know where you are with a book that promises the story ‘would violate the laws of plausibility’ if it appeared in a novel, and that’s in deep trouble. In the case of How to Ruin a Queen, however, this is a boast with a surprising amount of substance to it. You could make it up — just about — but you’d probably have a very sore head afterwards. In 1786 Cardinal Louis de Rohan, Grand Almoner of France and scion of one of the country’s leading families, went on trial accused of having stolen a 2,800-carat diamond necklace. This was serious enough, but what was far more serious